We performed a comparison between Grafana and Instana Dynamic APM based on real PeerSpot user reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Grafana is open source, flexible in integration, and has a strong community with helpful forums. While Instana has a user-friendly GUI and real-time data generation, it falls short in terms of integration and AI-based anomaly detection. Overall, Grafana is preferred for its wide range of features and scalability.
"The most valuable feature of the solution is the UI dashboard because we need to create a dashboard on Grafana to monitor our data."
"There are multiple kinds of models there to create dashboards, which is quite useful."
"The most valuable thing was that it had a good visualization tool."
"Collaboration: Shares data and dashboards across teams."
"The most important feature of Grafana is its alarm formatting capability."
"Visualisation: It is easy to create beautiful, understanding graphs, snapshots to share the graphs with people who do not have access to Grafana, and templating to create powerful graphs."
"Kubernetes could help us to better visualize the trend of our data by recording and displaying our history over a chosen duration, such as the last 30 days."
"Grafana has improved our analysis capability to solve an issue, increasing the co-working between IT services and business services."
"The primary selling point of this product is its unparalleled transparency into the infrastructure."
"It's great for monitoring services and applications."
"The detailing of our application behavior and user experience is most valuable. In case there is an issue, we typically use Instana to figure it out. We can drill down to the application and figure out what's going on and where the issue is."
"With auto-discovery, we didn't need to consider much. We just installed the agent on the host and it was able to detect everything from the host level up to the service level, for whatever stack was installed, and that includes containers and dockers."
"Visually, it's very good. It provides everything needed for dynamic detection, which is very useful."
"Sometimes it's able to provide a proper RCA on its own. It's able to correlate different events that occurred and that becomes like an RCA in itself."
"With Instana, the interface and the UI are very simple to use."
"If a key monitored value has crossed a threshold, it sends out an alert. And the solution is able to intelligently find out if something is beyond the range that it normally resides in."
"We need different kinds of applications in our infrastructure to see information in Grafana."
"Grafana need to improve the logging functionality."
"Lacks event management which affects our DevOps people."
"I had issues with the solution's configuration part."
"I find issues with Grafana. For example, I am unable to open some services there. Then, we have to open ten different tabs to get it fixed. And it's annoying when there's something going on; we want to check Grafana, and it throws four different errors."
"It's difficult to see the trends on the graph when the range is too long."
"Lacks in-depth graphs and sufficient AI."
"Its UI features to create charts can also be improved. Some features could have a link to the documentation."
"Its SLI and SLA features need improvement in setting up alerts."
"We should be able to go back to scenarios during or before the issue. There should be something like a history playback. Such a feature or functionality would be good."
"We'd always like to see additional functionalities."
"I think that Instana should improve the university and the certification process, so the users can find experts in Instana with their certification module process."
"The App Connect middleware does not integrate with or show corresponding sub nodes."
"While it is already quite good, there is room for improvement in terms of providing better functionality"
"Maybe log monitoring could be better."
"New Relic has a better UI in terms of how it presents the data."
Grafana is ranked 6th in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability with 39 reviews while Instana Dynamic APM is ranked 23rd in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability with 12 reviews. Grafana is rated 8.0, while Instana Dynamic APM is rated 7.4. The top reviewer of Grafana writes "Agent-free with great dashboards and an active community". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Instana Dynamic APM writes "A really good GUI that is easy for non-technical users to understand". Grafana is most compared with New Relic, Azure Monitor, Sentry, Dynatrace and Elastic Observability, whereas Instana Dynamic APM is most compared with Dynatrace, AppDynamics, New Relic, Elastic Observability and Splunk Enterprise Security. See our Grafana vs. Instana Dynamic APM report.
See our list of best Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability vendors.
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